Doug Harris: $3 Million Grant for a Randomized Trial of a New Approach
to College Financial Aid Programs

Douglas Harris,
working in partnership with Milwaukee
Public Schools (MPS), has won a grant for $3 million from the Institute of
Education Sciences, a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE), to
evaluate the efficacy of The Degree Project.

Douglas Harris

The Degree Project is a program that has provided scholarship
funding to a large group of MPS ninth graders in 2011. Traditional grant and
loan programs such as Pell grants wait to inform students about grants and
loans until after they are leaving high school—when many are already
off track. Compared to these “late commitments” aid programs, the
objective of The Degree Project and other “early commitment” programs
is to encourage students to improve their academic preparation and social capital
during high school, so they are better prepared for the social and financial
challenges they face on the way to and through college.

While many early commitment
scholarships have been instituted nationwide, and these have received broad
attention in the New York Times and other national media, this is the first
randomized trial of the program in the United States to test their effects.
With this USDOE grant, and with the support of the Great Lakes Higher Education
Corporation and Affiliates that has committed up to $30 million to fund the
scholarships, Harris and his team will test the program’s efficacy in
influencing students during high school and into college and seek to understand
how and why the program works. Given that traditional late commitment aid programs
spend more than $100 billion annually, the results of this experiment could
have a significant impact on the policy landscape for promise programs and
financial aid more generally.